Creative Needs Better Feedback

Vague feedback is harmful to the design process and the marketing of your product

It’s time for that weekly check-in with your creative team to go over the latest designs that will be a key part of marketing your newest product launch. Your first few thoughts as you’re viewing the presentation are, “I’m just not feeling it…”, “It seems to lack energy,” and “It just doesn’t pop.”

Now before you express these exact thoughts to your designers, STOP. These statements are vague and unhelpful for your creative team and likely to earn you a place at the top of the day’s lunchtime bitch session.

Contrary to popular belief that designers are a thin-skinned bunch that get offended if their creations are criticized, designers, in fact, welcome criticism. What they are looking for, though, is constructive criticism.

To provide this constructive criticism most effectively, you need to speak their language.

Fortunately, you do not have to go to art school to do it. You just need to learn a few basic components that make up every design and identify what component or components are problematic.

Design Components

Color

Color is likely the first aspect of a design that people notice.

As you examine your creative team’s designs, take note of the color usage.

Are the colors on-brand? Using exact brand colors is a must, and should generally be used for the majority of the elements in the design like fonts, buttons, and backgrounds.

If there are other colors in the design, do they complement your brand colors? Are you looking for more vibrant or saturated colors or something more subdued?

Typography

Typography is also a major component of design and like color, the typography should fit your brand standards.

Your brand should define which fonts can be used in a design. A general rule of thumb is to keep the number of different fonts in a design to two.

Also, take note of the amount of text within the design. Is there too much text? People generally scan web pages, ads and print pieces and respond better to short, concise copy.

Hierarchy

Hierarchy is closely tied to typography. The primary message of your designs should be focused at the top of your web page or print piece and the typography should scale from larger fonts for the important information to smaller for secondary information.

Maybe in the design, you feel like the most important aspects of your product are getting lost further down on the page or that the font sizes are inconsistent.

Composition

Composition is the arrangement of the various elements within the design. An important part of composition is not only the placement of elements like images and typography, but also the use of white space.

If there is something bothering you about the design, does it have to do with the composition? Does the design feel too cramped? Is it too symmetrical — making the design look static and boring? Do the photos or illustrations properly reflect the subject matter of the copy?

Now Onto Feedback

So! Let’s take everything we just learned and compose it into some great feedback that your creative team can work with.

It’s important to stress the “why” of every initiative, not only during feedback, but at the beginning of every large project kickoff. Talking about the “big purpose” behind what you are asking your designers to create can spark helpful dialog and allow your designers to use their expertise to craft a solution you may not have thought of.

Let’s start with the good. Identify and communicate to your team the elements of the design that you like and then move onto the areas that need improvement.

“I really like the direction that you’re taking these designs. You’ve made our brand colors really stand out, and I like some of the other colors you have incorporated into the design. The fonts, though, should be a little larger, and we should work with the content team to trim out some of the copy to give the design a little more white space. I would like to see more illustrations focused on our newest features. The most important thing we need these designs to show is how easy our product is to use.”

Now this is feedback your designers can work with! You have given them a list of actions to take and will likely save everyone time by reducing the number of design iterations.

If at any point your designers seem hesitant to change a part of the design — hear them out. They may have a valid argument. A great way to compromise while at the same time producing superior design to market your product or service is to user test and A/B test your marketing pieces. Let the data finalize the decision.

With this new approach, your creative team will be energized and motivated and will be debating the latest Marvel series at lunchtime instead of bitching about bad feedback.